Hi
everyone! It's been quite long since I wrote my latter post as
college stuff have been keeping me really busy. A few weeks ago I was
longing for drawing so badly, so I decided to try out something
different from what I had been doing so far. It was one of my
American literature lessons and after a chat with a classmate what
made me realise how I wanted my next pencil drawing to look like and
the poet I was going to get the inspiration from - the one and
only - Emily Dickinson.
When
I first faced the blank paper and my pencils, I was not sure at all
about the elements I would like to include or even how they
were going to take place in the paper to be honest. However, I was
completely sure about the message I wanted to convey. Anyway, it was
time to start!.1) Mrs spider was the first one on the
row. One may say that it is the base of the drawing, and certain it
is. As every item I drew, this one portrays Emily herself, her
constantly urge to play different roles while fictonalizing herself,
like if a matter of an actress would be. She is always writing poetry
no matter whenever she got some sort of inspiration, a torn piece of
paper or even a napkin had been worth enough to write on. Likewise,
spiders never give up on weaving and creating their clever webs and
so does Emily Dickinson with her poems. Both spin in silent (as women
were supposed to do at that time) building protection around
them not to get hurt. This spider is a spinster one as Emily is.
2)
Below, we find a skull which represents death. She
usually flirted with it, so it became a very common theme in her
poetry. As everybody can see, this skull is surrounded by bullets
that come right from 3) the loaded gun on the right
corner. Here again, she is taking the role of a loaded gun (kind of
masculine) breaking with all the female images and stereotypes. It is
a phallic symbol through which she stands up for being strong
and immortal somehow, just as poetry and poets are. This gun is
loaded with some ''love'' bullets (notice the heart at the end of
them) that go straight through 4) the book and
are addressed to death so as to get its attention and show her
coquette personality. Then, the reason why I decided to portray the
bullets breaking through the pages of the book was basically the fact
that through her poems, she evokes all those kind of feelings towards
death. She is constantly playing with ambiguity , leaving a lot of
things unsaid but implying instead, leaning on irony, loneliness and
assigning positiveness to all the things regarded as negative.
Finally, another of her most well-known traits was how passionate she
felt about nature. 5) The flower that is wrapped around the
gun symbolizes that, the birds, sunsets, seasons... everything that
involves nature was treated as a medium to talk about that love,
death and fear she endured in her life.
So....,
I think that pretty much summarizes what I meant to express with
this drawing. But, of course, many more interpretations are open are more than welcome,
which definitely is one of the things I love most about literature. I
really hope you like!!. Thanks a lot for reading and sticking around!
Love,
Ana x
